Word: dreisers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Willa Gather died, and readers recognized the passing of a true artist. Theodore Dreiser's final novel provided reminiscent readers with more of the honest pulp into which that slow, bewildered mill of meditation converted the tough timber of life. Booth Tarkington's last unfinished story faintly echoed the springtime tones that he caught from young middle-class voices in another...
Unless Theodore Dreiser's editors have fooled us again, "The Stoic" will take its place in American literature courses as his last novel. The course reading list will be the proper place for it, since--like Dreiser's other posthumous novel "The Bulwark"-- "The Stoic's" chief importance is historical rather than literary. The jacket blurb to the contrary, "The Stoic" simply does not reach the stature of "The Financier" or "The Titan," its predecessors in "The Trilogy of Desire." In concluding what Parrington called "a colossal study of the American businessman," Dreiser tells those familiar with the earlier volumes...
...this does not deny "The Stoic" its merits. As a story it is often good Dreiser, which is very good fiction indeed. Marked by the vitality and massive documentation typical of Dreiser, this extension of Cowperwood's activities into the London financial world at times hits with undeniable power. Although Dreiser never completed "The Stoic" he did live long enough to polish it far beyond the raggedness of "The Bulwark." This superiority inheres in the book's construction. Cowperwood--his business and his philanderings--occupies the stage at all times; hence there is none of the diffusion of energy that...
Despite the concentration on Cowperwood, "The Stoic" paradoxically achieves its major significance only after Dreiser has interred him in his lavish mausoleum. Strictly speaking, the closing section is extraneous both to this novel and to the trilogy as a whole. But as an epitaph to Cowperwood-and in fact to Dreiser himself--the long search into Brahmanism by Cowperwood's last mistress Berenice assumes a weight completely disproportionate to its length. In her study of the Yoga discipline Dreiser furnishes an acute insight into his own final outlook on life...
Written shortly before his death, when Dreiser had forsaken institutionalized religion for a Communist party membership card, the thorough and obviously sympathetic discussion of Berenice's training in Yogi lore reveals that Dreiser has finally found solutions to problems long troubling him. Always religious in nature and temperament, Dreiser devoted a good deal of his life to a search for earthly realization of the values of Christ. Rejecting Church dogma as sterile and oppressive, he ultimately found his personal Christ in Communism. Yet Dreiser's moving desire to explain the life force in other than material terms demanded a religious...